
Class H/ Y^ 

Bookyf 8" 



Copyright N°_ 



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T HE Masses 



AND THE 



millionaires. 



LECTURE 

fr -: by 

William Jackson Armstrong, 

Delivered before the Oakland Nationalist Club, in 

Hamilton Hall, Oakland, California, on 

Monday Evening, May 26, 1890. 



PRICE, TEN CENTS. 



Copyrighted 1890, by William Jackson Armstrong, 



The Masses ^Millionaires. 



Fellow-citizens: The highest attribute of man is not 
intelligence. Intelligence is common to the brutes. The 
noblest characteristic of our race is the capacity for the sense 
of justice. That sentiment the brutes do not possess. But 
among civilized or savage men there is none beyond its 
claim. Whether in marble palaces or African j ungles, there is 
no human heart that does not throb faster at its appeal. 
By this fact the civilization of man is possible. Justice is 
the music of history by which man marches to his destiny. 
The measure of any civilization is the measure of its justice. 
Men and women are civilized according as they hate injus- 
tice. The man who does not feel the wrong of his fellow- 
men is a savage. 

To-day the more enlightened nations of the world are face 
to face with the greatest problem of justice that has been 
met in history. With the work of civilization so far ac- 
complished that there is enough accumulated wealth to 
make comfortable all the people of civilized countries, there 
remains before the world the spectacle of almost infinite suf- 
fering and want. Behind this spectacle of suffering is the 
spectacle of inequality without corresponding merit. Be- 
hind this spectacle of inequality is the specter of fear in the 
lives of innocent millions. 



4 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

A few centuries ago these grim facts would have troub- 
led nobody. Those were ages of force and brutality. Men 
were indifferent to the suffering of their fellows. The sense 
of human rights had not quickened. To-day it is different. 
General Grant tells us in his memoirs that, knocked about 
in his boyhood in many log school-houses, he was told so* 
often that a noun was the name of a tiling that he began to 
believe it. A similar fatality lias overtaken modern Chris- 
tianity. It has been preached so long from the pulpits of 
the world, that there are people even outside of the churches 
who begin to suspect its doctrines of truth. To the minds 
of millions of men and women, the equality and brother- 
hood of man are no longer rhetorical phrases. Miraculous 
religion has fared as it could ; but, side by side with the 
growth of hideous wrongs, the growth of the moral instinct 
and the sharpening sense of the solidarity of our race, have: 
been the great features of our time. The presence of pov- 
erty and suffering in the midst of plenty is felt as a moral dis- 
cord. The conscience of civilization is troubled. The last 
decade of the nineteenth century begins with an interroga- 
tion point for justice. 

Millions of intelligent men and women are asking what 
is the matter, and, whatever is the matter, whether it cannot 
be cured. Other millions of intelligent men and women 
have begun to make answers to this question. There are 
five millions of Socialists in Germany. There are ten mill- 
ions of incipient Socialists in the United States. The opin- 
ion of these people, whether guided or misguided, will some 
November morning make a mighty force at the ballot-box. 
These thinking and intelligent people assert that injustice is 
the matter with our modern society. They assert that the 
civilization of Christendom is trying to live a lie, — with its 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. . O 

profession and its practice at swords' points. They point 
to the suggestive fact that for nineteen centuries it has 
preached from its pulpits the Sermon on the Mount, and 
lived in its marts by the gospel of Mammon; that its teach- 
ing and its example have never been introduced to each 
other ; that they do not speak as they pass by. 

They suggest that a possible inhabitant of Saturn, looking 
on this globe, observes the grotesque contradiction of the 
doctrine of universal love and human brotherhood taught on 
Sundays, and the cut-throat doctrine of the survival of the 
fittest and the devil for the hindmost, practiced during the 
remainder of the week — the spectacle of a civilization on 
whose lips are the ethics of humanity and whose w r orking 
scheme is a struggle for existence between man and man 
deadlier than the feuds of savagery — a scheme of society in 
which morality and the market have agreed not to interfere 
with each other. They answer that this state of things has 
a cure, and that this cure is for each man to give his labor 
to his fellow-men, and to take from the common product of 
labor the means for his own life. 

The people who make this charge against the existing 
order of things and suggest this remedy are mostly poor. 
They have not this world's goods. It has been urged against 
them that their philosophy is born not of their brains but 
of their pockets — where there is plenty of room. It has 
been said that the best cure for the socialist would be to 
give him a house and lot. That might cure the dishonest 
socialist, but it would not meet his doctrine. To cure social- 
ism you must answer its argument. There are wise and re- 
spectable men who make answer. They assert that the 
present order of things is the best possible for this world. 
They assert that the philosophy of socialism — all men for 



6 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

one man and one man for all — is a beautiful dream ; that if 
it became a reality it would bring greater oppression than 
is now endured. They affirm that the world is growing 
daily better and happier; that its existing order will in the 
end throw off" its own evils. They say that the scheme of 
enlightened self-interest, every man for himself, is the only 
scheme by which the progress of man and the evolution of his 
faculties are possible. They say that this scheme is scien- 
tific. This is their argument. Scientific enlightened self- 
interest is a splendid phrase; it is a part of scientific knowl- 
edge that can be understood by those innocent of all 
other science. It can be understood even by a millionaire. 
The wise and respectable people who are in love with the 
present order of the world — who make this answer to the 
socialist, are mostly comfortable in this world's possessions. 
They have farms, counting-houses, professorships, libraries, 
and cool bedrooms in the summer, f Their philosophy, also, 
might be accused of having origin in pockets — where there 
is not so much room.") But there is a more serious difficulty 
about it. There is a steadily-increasing number of people 
who do not believe in it, and there are steadily-increasing 
reasons for their disbelief. While these respectable and 
comfortable people are engaged in their libraries and banks 
in demonstrating that the present industrial arrangement 
among men is the only scientific possible arrangement, and 
that it will finally eliminate inequality and injustice from 
society, the fads in the world outside do not seem to pro- 
ceed in harmony with this view of the case. Cunning con- 
tinues to grasp the wealth of the world. Fraud piles up 
colossal fortunes in the hands of the few. Corporations 
corrupt the sources of public power. The larger industries 
steadily absoib the smaller, driving increasing numbers of 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 7 

independent men and women into the dependent ranks of 
wage earners, the profits of their labor running to the hands 
of the fortunate. Monopolies and trusts swallow for the ben- 
efit of individuals the legitimate opportunities and gains of 
millions of men. A million of honest women in our great 
■ cities slave for beggarly crusts that would not feed the cat of 
the millionaire. The world is filled with discontented labor. 
By every sun that rises we read reports from some part of 
this republic of the strikes or lock-outs of thousands of 
workmen, significant of mighty personal suffering and 
mighty public loss. The order of society is riotous and 
rotten with industrial war. In the midst of abundance, a 
million of willing Americans are tramping for bread. 

These are open facts ; nobody denies them. They are 
bad for the theory of the existing order of things in this 
world. They are bad for the assurances of the comfortable 
gentlemen of the libraries and parlors, who answer the 
complaint of the socialist. Their arguments would seem 
to have nothing to do with the case. 

These facts apply in greater or less degree to the condi- 
tion of every civilized country of the world. They are the 
facts which to-day are rocking the nations as they have not 
been rocked for a thousand years in the lap of war. They 
are the facts by the side of which all other facts — of learn- 
ing, of art, of discovery, or commerce, or law — are as noth- 
ing. They are the facts which have met civilization in its 
pathway as the old Theban Sphinx met the traveler, who 
must solve its riddle or die. They make the problem of 
our time. 

But for this occasion let us confine them to our own 
country. That they should exist here in their most fla- 
grant and threatening form in the land dedicated to the 



8 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

equal rights and the equal chances of men, is the most ex- 
traordinary event in history. 

What is it that has happened ? 

For a thousand years, covering the Dark Ages, the world 
was ruled by force. Might was the law of right. Hu- 
manity was a foot-ball tossed by conquerors. It believed 
in the divine right of kings and lords. It made no as- 
sertion of its dignity. The gentleman wore a sword as 
his badge of power. The peasant slept on husks in the 
valley, and worked for the prince on the hill-top. There 
were no peoples ; there were only lords and serfs. This 
was believed to be the natural order of things. At length 
there came a change. The human soul quickened. It be- 
gan to be felt that there were rights of men. The people 
sought power. They dethroned autocrats. By the end of 
the eighteenth century nearly every nation in Christendom 
had achieved something of political privilege. Then on 
the western shores of the Atlantic, a young nation arose 
in its might, bade ultimate farewell to kings, threw out the 
flag of equal rights, and humanity rose to its full stature, 
clothed with dignity and power. 

That was America! That was the achievement of 
Americans a century ago. It was the jubilee of humanity. 
The creed of Christ had touched the creed of the State. The 
eye of the world was strained toward the new continent. 
AVith equal political rights it was believed that here would 
be equal chances for all men — that the race for life would 
be fair; that the cards would not be marked — that the 
dice in the game would not be loaded. 

The citizens of the early republic were fellow-laborers 
under this inspiring faith. Every man had his farm, his 
shop, or his trade. All were independent workers. There 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIEES. 9 

were no autocrats of industry. There was not a tramp on 
the continent. In the hardest stress of life men stretched 
forth their hands and reached those of their fellows, and 
felt the quick touch of human brotherhood. 

That bright picture of equality was brief. Unexpected 
elements entered civilization. Steam, electricity, and ma- 
chinery — the genii of fire and force and speed — came to 
destroy the simple order of the past. Industry was warped 
into colossal lines. The handicrafts went to the wall. . Ag- 
gregated capital purchased the gigantic implements of the 
new time. Human labor was bound to the machine. Iron 
and steel became despots harder than any political tyrants. 
The wisdom of the fathers did not anticipate the problem 
Political freedom did not comprehend it. Parading its 
liberties, American humanity, like its handicrafts, went to 
the wall. Augustus Csesar boasted that he could rule the 
Romans as he pleased as long as he assured them that they 
were free. Lord Chesterfield, at the age of seventy, was in 
the habit of saying to his old servant Tyrawley : "Ty, you 
and I have been dead for many years if we only knew it. 
Let us walk down town and rehearse our funeral." 

When railroad corporations elect Legislatures in fifteen 
American States, American liberty is rehearsing its funeral. 

For this state of things whose is the fault? That is not 
the question. The facts are here. Their cause is human 
stupidity colossal as a planet. An age of science should 
have sounded warning a half a century ago. Neglecting 
the "proper study of mankind," it has afflicted us with re- 
dundant learning on bugs. 

Edmund Burke said that the respectable fabric of polit- 
ical society was the result of the blundering of one part of 
mankind operating with the villainy of the other. That 



10 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

has been the industrial history of the United States. Play- 
ing with forces so strange and mighty that they have 
changed the face of the world, we have drifted into a new 
epoch of civilization, and continued to apply to its problems 
the wisdom of the ancients. Attempting to carry the com- , 
merce of the Atlantic in the galley-boats of the Romans, 
would be idiocy less stupendous. 

Two hundred years ago, the common sense and the stat- 
utes of England made it a crime to make monopolies in the 
food of the people. To-day a committee of the American 
Congress finds on investigation that four butchers in the 
settlement of Chicago have " cornered " the meat of two- 
thirds of the continent. Tire man who corners the "meat of 
the masses" should hang — by the side of his dressed meat. 

"Combine or die!" has become the motto of modern 
trade. Not less than seventy American industries have 
been forced into monster trusts, to hold up prices and 
keep profits in the purses of the few. A half a dozen pools 
threaten to presently control the bread, butter, and boots of 
the United States. 

Even the solemn gentlemen who make our shrouds and 
coffins have formed a pool under the name of the "Na- 
tional Burial-Case Association." At the sound of this 
soothing and respectable title, we do not feel quite sure that 
we are not making a mistake in lingering above-ground. 
We have a sense that we may not be in quite the right 
company. AVe feel that we may owe it to ourselves to 
patronize these decorous gentlemen and get buried — and 
join the respectable majority. 

Not long ago these lugubrious gentlemen met in melan- 
choly conclave in Philadelphia, and, imagining themselves 
in a cemetery, proceeded to lay a tax on death. Their 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 11 

action to keep up the prices and down the number of coffins 
was kept secret, for fear the doctors might become dis- 
couraged and mortality lessened. 

Then the dealers in old rags and paper formed a trust 
in Cleveland, to deal with the old-rag problem — of how 
to cut down the enormous profits of the women of our 
country out of the contents of their rag-bags. The decree 
of the old rag-barons, issued in solemn council, ran: "No 
reduction in prices for old rags without consulting the 
syndicate." 

Half a dozen gigantic monopolies, headed by their king, 
have well-nigh appropriated the government of the United 
States. Their king is the railroads — the monopoly of 
transportation. These monopolies have assumed functions 
of power and privileges of taxation unfamiliar to a Persian 
shah or the Russian czar. Actual statistics upon this sub- 
ject prove that the taxes in excess of fair profits levied by 
these monopolies upon the American people are sufficient 
to carry on three perpetual foreign wars. 

By the force of combination, every ton of coal burned 
in the United States costs the consumer one-third more 
than its actual price, with fair profits to the monopoly 
handling it. 

The coal pirates of Pennsylvania and adjacent States 
thus mulct from a patient people a yearly tribute of forty 
millions of dollars. That " octopus of American trusts," 
the Standard Oil Monopoly, has piled Up its two hundred 
millions of capital by the same conspiracy — a tax upon 
the people's heat and light, "whipped from the nation's 
pocket," equal to the cost of a continual war with Spain or 
Mexico. 

Exemplary among these tender-hearted monopolies is 



12 THE MASSES AXD THE MILLIONAIRES. 

the gigantic Western Union Telegraph Combination, which, 

with the confident digestion of a Dodo, swallowed, a quar- 
ter of a century ago. sixty different companies at a gulp. 
With thirty-five millions of dollars of actual assets, this 
monopoly collects interest off the public on a nominal 
stock capital of one hundred millions of dollars, the slight 
difference between substance and shadow being fifty-five 
millions of pure water; thus levying upon the people 
of the United States, by reason of this fictitious stock, a 
tax equal to that on a permanent debt of 8150.000,000 of 
three per cent government bonds — the American and civ- 
ilized way of doing it. Add to the extortion of this mo- 
nopoly that of the Chicago butchers on the meat of the 
Great Wot. and you can fight England and Canada with 
the spoils every day in the year. 

The profits of the American railway barons are levied. 
in all, on a fictitious debt of four thousand million* of dol- 
lars! That would support a perpetual war against the 
Russian czar to aid the cause of the Nihilists. 

The robberies of the other American trusts and corpora 
tions would maintain another war against the remaining 
nations of Europe; or, in the year 1890, the people of the 
United States can wage a standing fight against the civil- 
ized world, with more money in their pockets, than in 
suffering the exactions of their own industrial tyrants. 
And yet that stupid generation of the American fathers 
plunged, like school-boys, into revolution for a three-cent 
tax on tea! They were young and callow. They had not 
learned the patient ox-eyed philosophy which comes of 
high civilization in the golden age of trusts. .V hundred 
and fifty American industries are shuffled in the hands of 
pool-mongers like a deck of cards. An American billion- 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 13 

aire buys up, at a stroke, seventy coal mines, within as many 
miles of St. Louis, to steal the cheapness of warmth from 
his fellow-men. 

Think again of these sweet-mannered modern buccaneers 
— the great American railroads! The National Rich 
Man's Club — the caucus of millionaires — sitting as the 
United States Senate, reports, in a swift spasm of confidence, 
after a careful investigation, that these railways, the com- 
mon carriers of the land, which have received their fran- 
chises and privileges from the people, levy a tax on their 
benefactors which the National Congress would not dare 
assume. A committee of the New York Legislature, 
making similar investigation, confirms this report by stating 
that the tribute laid by these corporations upon the nation 
is one which "no government would dare levy upon any 
people." 

Approach the gentlemen who sit in the gilded palaces of 
these corporations, and ask their terms for the shipment of 
any new product of labor, and you are submitted to an 
inquisition as to the profits of your private business in the 
manufacture of that commodity which the most despotic 
State would blush to impose on its subjects. 

The rule of robbery with these Robin Hoods of the 
modern highway is "all that the traffic will bear." Their 
motto of prudence is not to kill the goose. But sometimes 
the goose expires under the plucking. A Nebraska farmer 
read in his weekly paper the market price for corn. Be- 
lieving that there was a fair j^rofit for his labor, he shipped 
his entire harvest by the neighboring railway to the great 
city, and awaited his financial returns. They promptly 
came. They were a bill against the farmer for fifteen dol- 
lars! — the balance in favor of the railroad after deducting 



14 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES, 

the selling price of the corn. The farmer hunted up an 
ancient algebra of his school-days, computed and paid 
a minus profit. The next year he hunted rabbits. 

On the rich prairies by the Missouri, the average estimate 
for shipping three hundred bushels of corn to market is 
two hundred bushels for the railways. 

That is what is the matter with the American farming 
industry! Not long ago a governor of Kansas in a mes- 
sage to the Legislature of Ins State, said: " If the extortion 
of our railways is not speedily corrected, agriculture in the 
western half of this Slate will have to be abandoned. 
Only the marvelous wealth and productive energy of the 
State have thus far enabled the people to pay such sums 
annually." 

Under the exactions of this CaBsarian brigandage, the 
farming lands of that imperial State are passing rapidly 
into the dead hand of Eastern pawn-brokers. A recent 
memorial to its representatives in Congress from citizens of 
that State, recites that a single law firm in an inconsiderable 
Kansas town holds eighteen hundred mortgages on as many 
Kansas farms. An eloquent Californian asserts that the 
railroad monopoly of his State has gone into partnership 
with every farmer in California, "with the corporation on 

top." 

Computing generously for every cost, including running 
expenses, interest on invested capital, and replacement of 
worn-out tracks and cars, a United States citizen can be 
transported from San Francisco to Boston in a twenty- 
thousand-dollar Pullman coach for a cost of less than hvo 
dollars. A United States hog can be carried over the same 
ground for the same price. The railroad companies charge 
the citizen for this ride one hundred and thirty dollars. 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 15 

They charge the hog only six dollars and a half. That is 
the advantage in the United States of being a hog! The 
advantage of being a hog is the same as that of being a 
railway. But we can't all be hogs. 

An Irish car driver in the city of San Francisco points 
to the central building of the great railway corporation, 
and with the graphic rheotric of his race informs the tender- 
foot stranger that "inside of them walls is the whole State of 
California! " The information is superfluous to the native 
sons of the Golden West. They know their master. How 
long will Americans endure these masters? 

These hideous facts are only pimples on the body of the 
chartered corruptions of our time. The railroads simply 
accept the business morals of the age — save that they run 
them by steam. Into the hands of these giant monopolies 
a confiding nation has surrendered rights and powers over- 
shadowing and corrupting its own authority. If you would 
touch for wholesome legislation the hem of the garments of 
power, go no longer to Washington. American sovereignty 
has retreated into the offices of corporations. Against the 
gold which was a conquered people's ransom, the Spartan 
tyrant threw the weight of his sword. Against the liberties 
of a robbed nation the gigantic corporations of this repub- 
lic throw the weight of their ill-gotton gold. Mr. Jay 
Gould informs an investigating committee of the New York 
Legislature that the railroads have gone out of politics, hav- 
ing found it cheaper to bay legislators than to elect them! 
Lord Eldon said: "Corporations have neither souls to be 
saved nor bodies to be kicked." One would believe that 
this noble lord had been making American studies of the 
entities he described. 

We are in the midst of au epoch facing despots more 



16 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

grim than all the autocrats of history. The barbarous feu- 
dal lord — the baron of the hill-top — allowed his serfs their 
crust and ale, and to sleep without fear in their huts at the 
foot of his castled crag. The despot of our modern indus- 
try drives enlightened freemen to starvation and despair. 
By recent statistics of the United States Labor Department, 
one million of willing Americans are tramping the streets of 
our cities and the highways of the land hunting for work and 
bread. Think of that for the "best government the sun 
ever shone upon!" With grain in our fields to feed the 
hunger of a planet, that is a spectacle to discredit the in- 
telligence of any epoch of history. If this is civilization, 
what is barbarism? In my judgment that human society 
only is a success which feeds and shelters all its honest 
members. 

Political privilege has failed to solve the problem. 
Equal rights have not saved the equal chances of men. 
American liberty has not proved itself the last wisdom of 
time. The magic exhilaration of pinching a ballot is lost 
on an empty stomach. E<jual rights pall on the fancy of 
the citizen uncertain of a square meal. 

The vote is no longer the symbol of American equality. 
The moneyless man and the millionaire do not make an 
equation on election-days. By a hundred indirections the 
owner of a million dollars may multiply his vote to a hun- 
dred or a thousand. The sense of American equality has 
been lost. The eagle has become a little less proud. His 
countenance is sickly. His wings droop. The* Fourth of 
July orator no longer steps nimbly to the front. Something 
has happened. Something is the matter. He hardly 
knows what. But it has dawned even upon his exuberant 
optimism that things are no longer as they were. He has 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 17 

heard of an election in Ohio — a million of dollars eloping 
with a thimbleful of brains and becoming United States 
Senator. He has heard of a syndicate lock-out in the coal 
fields of Pennsylvania to raise the price of coal, and which 
has written despair over the doorways of a hundred thou- 
sand laborers. He has heard of the corner on meat by 
the four butchers of Chicago. He is saddened. He goes 
home; his occupation is gone. The sawdust is out of the 
great American doll-baby — the Fourth of July. 

What has happened? Civilization promised the toiling 
masses of the world the lifting of its weary burdens. It 
promised liberty, equality, prosperity. It has not kept its 
promise. American civilization promised most of all. Its 
lips were roses. It promised to all men. There is disap- 
pointment. A country whose products will nourish a bill- 
ion of men- whose machinery will supply the planet — 
scarce sixty millions on its soil, a million of men begging 
for the privilege to earn their bread. That is civilization 
with a vengeance! 

Why has the doctrine of equal rights in the State failed 
to soften the inequality of conditions between men? With 
the creed of human brotherhood on its lips, why does our 
civilization deepen the gulf between classes? The money- 
less workingman and the cunning millionaire side by side 
in the gates of the twentieth century! How came they 
here together? Has the race between these two been hon- 
est? 

Three-quarters of a century ago, in the beginning of the 
epoch of steam, wise men said: " We have arrived at the 
golden age; the giants have come to bear the burdens of 
men. The gods of fire and force will enrich this fair world; 
there will be enough for all. Poverty will vanish like a 



18 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

dream. The music of wheels, the laughter of steam and 
steel, will take the place of the groans of men. There will 
be leisure for the heart and brain of our race." 

What a mockery that golden vision appears to-day! 
Three-quarters of a century have passed. The gods have 
done their part. The wealth of the world has multiplied a 
hundred-fold. Civilization has grown rich — rich beyond 
prophecy. The gold of the Caesars and the treasures of the 
old East — of the nations by the " Oxus and the Ind " — are as 
a pallid dream beside the imperial wealth of modern States. 
That old opulence compared with ours was as their crude 
galley-boats to the queenly ships that cleave our modern 
seas. 

The machinery of the two Anglo-Saxon nations — Amer- 
ica and England — are equal in producing power to one 
billion of men. Its products would gladden the great hu- 
man heart of this world. It would soften the poverty of 
the planet. It would feed the hunger of savage and civ- 
ilized men — and honest civilized men still ask for bread ! 

In 1860 the wealth of the United States was $16,000,- 
000,000. To-day it is $55,000,000,000— forty billions in 
thirty years! Where is that wealth? where is that money? 
Let us see! 

It was Daniel Webster who said, "Tne freest govern- 
ment cannot long endure where the tendency of the law is 
to create a rapid accumulation of property in the hands of 
the few." It has been wisely asserted that the constitutions 
office States are made to prevent the encroachment's of 
capital — that tlie diffusion of wealth is the secret of a na- 
tion's power. 

"That nation is the most prosperous which contains the 
greatest number of happy homes," eloquently declares the 
chief of our national labor department. 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 19 

Thirty years ago you counted the men of this country 
who owned a million dollars on your finger tips. To-day 
there are seventy fortunes in the United States of more than 
twenty millions each. Poor but respectable people worth 
only a million or two of dollars each are numbered by the 
thousands. No country town sets up pretensions to re- 
spectability without having at least one of these represent- 
atives of genteel poverty as an inhabitant. 

The town of Chicago has over two hundred persons 
with fortunes of from one to fifty millions each. A local 
newspaper of that region points with pride to the fact that 
every dollar of the wealth of these gentlemen has been 
made within the past fifteen years! We would have ex- 
pected better of Chicago, where conscience is notably act- 
ive — and where they have all the meat; but this is com- 
mendable rapidity. 

They do it better in the city by the. Golden Gate, where 
an impoverished citizen worth only a few hundred thousand 
dollars has made two millions in a day. 

They do it better in some other American localities. 
Six months before his death, it was known in the commer- 
cial world that, by the shrinkage of values, the great Van- 
derbilt had lost nearly fifty millions of his wealth. But 
almost in the face of that dread hour which swung behind 
hi in the gates of all earthly fortune, the great billionaire, 
by a single gigantic stroke, regained the lost stake. Hang- 
ing to life by the eyelids, he quietly manipulated a few 
railroads — a game he understood. He secretly depressed the 
value of their stocks. Then he sent agents into the market 
to buy them up wholesale. The stocks, being in demand, 
rose to unprecedented worth. Then Croesus unloaded, as- 
tonished the world, and died with the greatest private fort- 
une known to history intact. 



20 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

That is what a dying man can do in New York, under 
the laws of American industry ! But the fifty millions in 
the purse of the billionaire represented the wreck of the 
little fortunes of a thousand innocent men and women, 
while a hundred gamblers of Wall Street fattened on the 
spoils. 

Three Americans of our generation severally beginning 
life with a bundle of firs, the deck of a ferry-boat, and a 
mouse-trap, have amassed fortunes of one and two "hundred 
millions each. That demonstrates the capacity of the 
American mouse-trap. These are our modern Caliphs of 
Bagdad. 

There are one hundred private fortunes in the United 
States, aggregating $3,000,000,000— one-twentieth of the en- 
tire wealth of the American people ! There are one hundred 
thousand Americans whose combined possessions constitute 
more than one-half of the property of the United States. 
One-half of the wealth of the nation in one hundred thou- 
sand purses ! 

That is what has become of the wealth of the American 
people! That is the answer to the question of what has 
been done with the riches of the nation produced by the 
genii of modern science and invention. That is what has 
been accomplished in thirty years under the best govern- 
ment the sun ever shone upon ! 

This is the answer of the land of the Declaration and 
equal rights ! These thrifty gentlemen have simply frozen 
out more than one-half of their sixty millions of fellow- 
citizens. 

The money made by the common forces and the common 
toil of the nation is in those private heaps. The till of civil- 
ization has been tapj>ed. 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 21 

Iii thirty years more the property of the country, unless 
prevented, will be in half as many hands as now. Com- 
pared with the wealth which has been produced, the Amer- 
ican people have remained poor. Millions of honest toilers 
have remained only less than beggars. The English phi- 
losopher, Mr. Frederic Harrison, tells us that ninety per 
cent of the producers of England have no homes. 

An eloquent pen has written: "It was hoped in the 
dawning era of modern invention that all servile and ex- 
hausting toil would be lifted from man ; that all the neces- 
saries of life would be so multiplied that the poor would 
cease to want." It was John Stuart Mill who affirmed 
that it was questionable whether all the mechanical inven- 
tions had ever lightened the wtiroi any"human being. 

But there are those mountains of wealth ! Here are 
these valleys of poverty! Between them is significance. 
There is a connecting link. What is that link ? Shrewd 
men in the streets tell us that it is "sagacity," "energy," 
" enterprise," " brains." " Smart" men in the colleges say 
that it is the " wages of superintendence." 

American common sense and morality begin to call it by 
other names not so sweet. These names are "injustice," 
"fraud," "cunning," "robbery" — "humanity pillaged by 
buccaneers." 

But let us not go too fist. American intelligence and 
morality may be wrong. They may need enlightenment. 

There is a curious thing called 

POLITICAL ECONOMY. 

They have it in the colleges. It is .in preservation there. 
It should be approached with care and reverence. It 
has sometimes been handled by kings ; but modern legis- 



fiu 



22 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

lators have always been afraid of it. They have been 
afraid that if they got too near it something might happen — 
that it might explode. It is two or three thousand years 
old. Something has been known of it for that time. The 
Pharaohs had a sample of it. But it has 'been called a 
science for not much more than a hundred } r ears. A very 
wise man stated its laws in the latter part of the last century. 
His name was Smith. He believed devoutly in the prin- 
ciples of his science, but he never dreamed what a wild 
African terror his aristocratic name would inspire among 
the wise men of this world who should come after him. 

This science assumes that there is enough work in this 
world for every man and woman ; that they can always 
find this work near at hand; that there will always be 
enough products of human labor— food, shelter, and cloth- 
ing — to go round — and never too few or too many; for a 
mysterious thing called "Supply and Demand" attends to all 
that. This science assumes that there will never be too few 
or too many laborers in one kind of work; because if there 
are too low, the products of that work will become scarce 
and dear, the wages high, and other laborers will come in ; 
if there arc too many, the products of the work will be 
plentiful and cheap, the wages low, and laborers will go 
into some other occupation where there is greater demand — 
that another mysterious thing, called "Freedom of Con- 
tract, " will take care of all that. 

That science tells us that competition in each industry, 
and between the various industries, will keep the price of 
products reasonable and the profits of the various industries 
uniform and equitable, giving each man a fair chance in the 
struggle for life. 

The scheme of this beautiful science, when they had 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 23 

worked out all its mysterious details, — capital, wages, profit, 
rent, interest, etc., — they called by an elegant French name, 
lamez /aire — the "let-alone," or "let-go" scheme. Then 
they let it go. They asserted that it had been going for 
two or three thousand years, and that it was the only scheme 
that would go in this world and leave human beings the 
chance for liberty and happiness. 

There is a great deal of wisdom in this splendid and elab- 
orate science. There is a great deal of truth that has not 
been entirely escaped by its mysterious doctrines. The study 
of these doctrines has brought a great deal of knowledge 
as well as a great deal of insanity into this world. There 
must always be some insanity in anything which is respect- 
able. This science is respectable, but it is not fascinating. 
Mark Twain assured his wife concerning their first baby 
that he respected it, though he did not love it. 

This scheme called political economy is believed in im- 
plicitly by a great many English and American college 
professors. That settles its social status. It is a pet in 
nearly all the colleges of the United States, except Johns 
Hopkins, where they are studying it, along with other curios- 
ities, to see what it is made of. Inside of some of these institu- 
tions called universities, where they teach theology, astron- 
omy and the dead languages, it is perfectly satisfactory. 
The professors get five thousand dollars a year; the students 
are the sons and daughters of comfortable families, where 
supply and demand are always equal, and laissez /aire 
works like a charm. 

It is so satisfactory to these institutions that occasionally 
when it does not work so well outside, and leaves working- 
people very needy and poor, there are friends of humanity 
among these scholarlv gentlemen who are willing to devote 



24 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

their time to composing recipes of shin-bone soup, on which 
they assert that the American laborer can live on six and a 
fourth cents a day. This soup is not recommended to mill- 
ionaires and professors. It is merely the soup of political 
economy. It is the soup of science. It is the soup of the- 
ory — it is shadow soup. 

Independently of these facts, Mr. Smith's theory of polit- 
ical economy, invented bofore the discovery of steam-power 
and electricity, is fit to be the monument of the genius of 
any man. It was a great thing to do in his time. I speak 
of it reverently. 

But this splendid and august theory, tin's wonderful and 
mysterious entity, called laissez faire, placed in practice on 
American soil consecrated a century ago to equal rights, 
has created in that century as vast a result of human ine- 
quality — of contrasted want and wealth, of poverty and 
power — as was known to the rotten reign of the Ciesars. It 
has distorted the just conditions of social life. It has es- 
tranged classes of citizens. It has placed the wages of toil 
in the hands of idleness. It has made Cunning a prince 
and Honesty a pauper. It has made Industry a slave to 
feed Indolence as a parasite. It has written despair over 
the doorways of millions of homes. It has dwarfed Child- 
hood with premature toil. It has filled the breast of Labor 
with discontent, and the streets of cities with the tramp of 
soldiers in times of peace. It has placed manufacture un- 
der the surveillance and protection of hired detectives — the 
Pinkertons and the police. It has laid the dead hand of 
debt on the ploughman, and pawned the lands of the West 
to the princes of the East. It has given to millionaire gam- 
blers and railroad monarchs the power to lay an embargo 
on the wheat fields of the prairies, and " with a stroke 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 25 

of a pen to make famine crouch in the streets of our 
cities." It has made tender women toil for the pittance 
of beggars, or flee to prostitution for bread. It has made 
the anarchist and the tramp. It has handed over to mer- 
ciless co-operations the gigantic industries of the nation, to 
unseat the will and debauch the conscience of the nation 
itself. It has enfeebled the sense of national honor. It 
has made pillage for private greed of the resources of a 
mighty and generous people. It has kidnapped for monop- 
oly the government of the United States. 

Under this shooting Niagara they tell us that water does 
not flow downhill ! 

So much for the immaculate scheme of laissez /aire in 
^unrestricted play on American soil for a century ! This 
precious professorial doctrine should gladden American van- 
ity in the stupendous. Its achievements have been miracles. 
It has shorn this nation, which began in liberty a century 
ago, of the power of volition — the Delilah to the American 
giant. In the streets of our cities, on election-days, the vote 
of an American sovereign is bought for a barrel of flour, 
because bread has become more precious than the ballot. 
In twenty States of this Union we innocently ask which is 
the railroad's candidate for Congress. That settles the 
question. We are sure that he is the most honest man. 

Every American industry passes rapidly into the hands 
of monopoly. The millions that are made pass to the pock- 
ets of the few, the Jack Sheppards and Dick Turpins of 
American Society. These are the gentlemen who emigrate 
to the United States Senate, sit like kings at the head of 
syndicates, give feasts like Lucullus, purchase the admira- 
tion of a grateful people by flinging back to them in charities 
a fragment of the spoils of which they have robbed them, and 



26 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

lie in marble mausoleums costing a hundred and fifty thou- 
sand dollars, when they are dead. We do not envy them 
living or dead. They, too, are the victims of the industrial 
morals of their time. They sell "futures;" they would sell 
eternity if they could. But while they feast or lie in costly 
and useless marbles, a million of their honest countrymen 
are tramping. for a crust. 

Xo dead American has a right to lie under a grave-stone 
worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars while a live 
American woman is starving in a garret. 

The wealth of this world belongs to the quick and not to 
the dead. Civilization is not rich enough to furnish mauso-- 
Leums for dead capitalists — or yachts for live ones. Its in- 
dustries should be devoted to producing the necessities of 
life as long as one needy human being exists. 

So much for eighteenth-century political economy in 
nineteenth-cSntury civilization ! So much for the science of 
an age of dreams in an age of steam! So much for the re- 
sults of the philosophy of Adam Smith in the New Repub- 
lic! 

How much for its intelligence? It has not been a suc- 
cess in practice; it may be wise in theory. It may have 
failed by accident, The professors assure us that it is wise. 
Tliey affirm that it is a science. They assert that it is the 
only scheme by which human beings can live side by side 
in this world witli the assurance of peace an< I prosperity. 
They assert that it is the only scheme by which the indus- 
trial order of the world can be maintained. We should 
not be too hasty in disputing their verdict. If there is any- 
thing in this world approaching omniscience, it is the brain 
of a college professor of political economy. 

But let us see! This science is the alleged science of 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 27 

supply and demand. This principle, they say, will regulate 
and adjust the conditions of human labor. This is the 
principle under which the order of society now exists. But 
for two-quarters of a century the most remarkable and per- 
sistent feature of our modern industrial order has been the 
war between capital and labor — between employer and em- 
ployed. Ugly things called strikes and lock-outs cover every 
civilized land. Not a week, not a day passes, but shops 
and mills close, industries cease, and thousands and hun- 
dreds of thousands of workingmen turn to idleness in the 
streets. The sensitive ear of humanity is assailed with the 
clangor of human rage and suffering. The man with the 
purse is testing the supply of labor to purchase it at the 
most beggarly price. The man with a tin bucket is testing 
capital to get a larger share of profit. The conflict is mer- 
ciless, endless, deadly. The splendid theory of the profess- 
ors — Supply and Demand — works perfectly in the air, over 
their heads. Like the flowers that bloom in the spring it 
has nothing to do with the case. 

The United States Government, through its department 
of labor, lias looked into this matter. It finds that ten mill- 
ions of days' labor are lost through this conflict to the pro- 
ductive force of this country in a single year. It has found 
that the loss to the country in the same time by this cause 
is $300,000,000 — enough to support the havoc of another 
foreign war at nearly a million a day. This is scientific econ- 
omy with a vengeance. This is the laissezfaire of the col- 
lege professors at full play. 

There is another feature of this scientific economy. They 
call it the dismal science. You see that it has been slan- 
dered, that it is a very entertaining study. Under this 
beautiful and perfect system, a man or set of men with a 



28 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

bank account sets up a manufactory of products — of food or 
clothing or soap or pills or iron nails. Other men and other 
companies set up other manufactories of these goods in 
other parts of the country. These establishments know 
nothing accurately of the conditions of the supply or demand 
in these products, There is no understanding between them. 
There cannot be by the nature of the case; this is compe- 
tition. They know nothing accurately of the ability or 
intentions of each other in regard to production. The 
inspired principles of political economy working in the air 
should teach them all this; but they do not. So they man- 
ufacture goods at full steam, launch them by all cun- 
ning ways on the great unknown sea of demand, the mar- 
ket; and each tries to steal the trade and crush the busi- 
ness of his rivals; for this is the Christian principle of 
modern competition. 

Some day, early in the morning, it is found that there are 
more soap and starch and shoes and sugar and suspenders 
and cotton goods, and iron nails, than anybody or every- 
body will buy. Tills have become, so to speak, a "drug 
in the market." Factories suspend or close. Workmen 
are turned into the streets. Without wages they cannot 
buy these goods or other goods. They want them, but can- 
not buy them. This the professors of Mr. Smith's political 
economy call "Over-production." Then other manufacto- 
ries suspend. There is a crash — universal poverty and mis- 
ery. But the professors are prepared for this also. They 
give it a scientific name. They call it an "Industrial De- 
pression." That vindicates their science. Whenever you 
wish to be certain that a thing is scientific just see if you 
can understand its names. If you cannot understand them, 
then it is a science. 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 29 

But this system without organic unity or co-ordination — 
this chaos turned loose for human suffering — is the scientific 
scheme of political economy in the last quarter of the nine- 
teenth century among civilized peoples! One wonders how 
this scheme looks to those who dwell above the stars. 

The poet Watts has told us that there is a land that is 
fairer than this. Suppose from, up there, having a little 
pardonable curiosity as to how things are managed under 
the " best government the sun ever shone upon," they should 
send down a celestial expert to investigate the United 
States. Suppose that heavenly messenger should arrive in 
one of these eras of industrial depression. He would float 
with swift angelic wings over the bosom of this broad land. 
He would see the prairies waving with golden grain, the 
barns and bins heaped full with accumulated harvests, the 
pork fattening in the valleys, the cattle feeding on a thou- 
sand hills. He would see the warehouses and shops of the 
hamlets and great cities filled with the supplies of human 
want — with stores of food and clothing and luxuries. He 
would see millions of strong men idle and threadbare and 
hungry in the roads and streets — millions of sad-eyed women 
and children standing by the shop windows looking long- 
ingly upon the piled objects of their need — which they 
could not buy. He would see millions more with the fear 
of the future shadowing their faces. Then he would ask a 
few questions and return to that upper world and report to 
its Sanhedrim. He would tell the strange and pitiful tale 
of want in the midst of plenty. They would ask him in 
amazement whether he had received no explanation of such 
a strange condition of things as this. He would answer 
that he had ; that he had applied to the college professors — 
the political economists; that they had made the matter 



30 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

quite clear; that these gentlemen had assured him that the 
reason why their fellow-citizens were idle was because too 
much work had been done in the world; that the reason 
why women and children were threadbare and ragged was 
because there was too much clothing; the reason why they 
were homeless was because there were too many houses; 
that the reason why men were starving was because there 
was too much wheat and bread ! that there was a "glut in 
the market" — an "industrial depression!" 

The Sanhedrim would ask this angelic expert if he was 
satisfied with this explanation? He would reply that he 
was; that the professors had demonstrated that the scheme 
by which these things happened was scientific — that he had 
become a convert to Mr. Smith. Then for the first time in 
the history of Paradise, they would levy a tax to build a 
celestial idiot asylum, and that fallen angel would become 
its first inmate. 

So much for the intelligence of laissez fairef How stands 
its morality? In one of the royal libraries of the world 
there was said to be extant a few centuries ago an ancient 
book, entitled a "History of Snakes in Ireland." 'That 
volume, with its many chapters, and its curious binding of 
massive gilt and gold, contained but a single sentence. 
That sentence was as follows: "As to snakes in Ireland, 
there are none there." A similar volume would hold the 
description of the morality of laissez faire political economy 
— the doctrine of the modern competitive system of labor. 
There is none there. 

Professor J. Stanley Jevons, one of the high priests of 
this doctrine, informs us in one of his books that the first 
step in the study of political economy is to rid the mind of 
the notion that there arc any such things in matters of 
social industry as "abstract rights." 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 31 

That is the morality of Wall Street— just sufficient to 
keep out of the penitentiary! That is the morality of the 
Paul Cliffords and Jesse Jameses, who hold up railroad 
trains on the western slopes. That is the morality of Jay 
Gould, who buys up a hundred coal mines at a stroke to 
keep up the price of the poor man's heat. These gentle- 
men are the apt and searchingpupils of Mr. Jevons. His 
political economy furnishes the convenient principle of their 
trade. They are not troubled about abstract rights. They 
are political economists. 

A professor of Yale College, another unextinct pachy- 
denh of modern learning, assures us that " social classes owe 
nothing to each other." Why is it that when the schemes 
of Satan are to be upheld in this world, the wisdom of the 
university and pulpit is so often at its call? — slavery, au- 
tocracy, robbery! 

When they salt a California or Colorado gold mine, a 
learned professor is always on tap to sell it to a London 
syndicate. If these things be modern learning, let us 
abandon scholarship and betake ourselves to the university 
of humanity and the streets. 

They prove to us, with "curious and labored statistics, that 
the condition of the laborer of to-day is better than that of 
the poor man of history. They assail us with the maudlin 
argument that the modern workingman enjoys comforts un- 
known to the prince of a few centuries ago; that the feudal 
lord, like his serf, slept on bulrushes, and the modern 
poor man under a blanket — as if it were a question of bed- 
clothes rather than of the security of sleep! 

There is a difference between absolute and relative pov- 
erty. The poverty of past centuries was relative. That of 
to-day is absolute. The blankets and bread of the nine- 



32 THE MASSES A>"D THE MILLIONAIRES. 

teenth century are better than the rushes and crusts of the 
middle ages : but humanity in the middle ages was at least 
certain of its crusts and rushes. 

The morality of the competitive system, outside of a 
book, is the morality of medieval barbarism that made 
Might the basis of Eight — the savage doctrine of the sur- 
vival of the strongest, that strips Humanity naked at the 
feet of Cunning; that places manhood at the mercy of 
meanness; that asserts in the sunrise of the twentieth cent- 
ury that man i- merchandise — his heart and brain to be 
bought and sold in the cheapest market, like a bundle of 
old furs! 

It is the morality of the Roman coliseum. In that sav- 
age arena they pitted man against his fellows to struggle 
with grievous and ghastly wound- to the death. When 
the gladiator fell he hailed the bloody tyrant who had 
devoted him to death, "Morituri ti salutamus Ooesar!" 
That. too. i< the cry of dying workingmen to the Caesar of 
Christian civilization as they fall in the murderous coliseum 
of competitive labor— men pitted against their fellow- by 
the alternative of life or death — men pitted, by the struggle 
f»r bread, against Steam and steel — a thousand time- more 
pitiless than the >teel of the Roman. 

That struggle rilled the arena of a holiday; ours is the 
perpetual conflict over the amphitheater of a continent. 

The Christian cannot accuse the pagan. The murder of 
his civilization is slower: it> method is finer. It- horrors 
are tempered to the sensitive nery.es of a generation whose 
lips are moist with the professions of the doctrine of the 
lowly Nazarene; but as sure as this world turns, and 
those stars come out in nightly majesty into their clean 
reproachful spaces, beneath this thing called modern civili- 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 33 

zation — beneath this travesty of science that names itself 
industral competition — there lies a barbarism more than pa- 
gan, a stupidity that is infinite. 

Primitive man, the man of the woods and caves, would 
not endure hunger and want. He emerged for conquests 
and spoils. "The ravages of Atilla and Geneseric began 
from the stomach." Civilized want is shy and modest. It 
dresses itself, if it may, in the garb of respectability. It 
smiles in the face of the pitiless world. But underneath 
this ghastly complacence there exists to-day in the sharp- 
ened sensibilities of modern men and women a mass of acute 
agonies such as never pierced the heart of savage races. 

The industrial competition under which we live is ad- 
justed only to the satisfaction of the fortunate. Those who 
fall in the struggle with the praises of human dignity and 
equality ringing in their ears, naturally accuse the scheme 
which has brought them despair. Victor Hugo has said, 
"The paradise of the rich is the hell of the poor."' Under 
the American flag there should be no hungry man. On 
American soil there should be no want. A great philoso- 
pher has said that while there exists an honest man without 
enough to eat, no man should have more than enough. 

But they tell us of the freedom of contract — the sacred 
freedom of contract between wealth and the workingman ! 
That is freedom indeed! — the "iron law of wages!" 
Wealth can wait: wane- starve in a day. The freedom of 
contract with Death in the scales against the workingman! 

That is the grim sarcasm of the freedom of contract. 

Cardinal Manning, the great Catholic Englishman, de- 
clares that the freedom of contract on which political econ- 
omy glorifies itself "cannot be rightly said to exist.'' He 
appeals to the great Catholic Church to protect the laboring 
poor who have builded the modern commonwealths. 



34 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

It was said of the Italian Caesar Borgia, that he was a 
soldier every inch of him, but a villain to the last fiber. 
Caesar Borgia said: " If a man wishes for success he must 
not hesitate to make stepping-stones of the corpses of his 
neighbors." 

That is the morals of nineteenth-century Industry. 
A heart of flint and a conscience as devoid of moral consid- 
eration as an absence of all fear can make it, are the chief 
stock in trade for success in modern competition. 

But the gentlemen of the colleges assure us that the 
evils of the competitive scheme arise not from the use but 
from the abuse of that system. They are right. The unre- 
stricted use of that scheme anywhere in this world is its abuse. 
That scheme carries within it the seeds of its own defeat. 
It insures combination. Where combination is possible, 
competition is impossible. The wages of labor do not pur- 
chase back the products of labor. There follows stagna- 
tion, depression, wrong. 

That is your beautiful Adonis of laissez fane when 
stripped naked! It is a padded hunchback. It has neither 
a brain nor a heart, The dismal science! It is the comic 
science. It would make the gods laugh. That scheme is 
no! for this world ; il is for some unknown planet — peopled 
with professors of political economy. 

Man is not a commodity. He is not a compound of 
mathematical quantities or chemical gases. He has a heart 
and a brain, and between these spring a thousand needs 
and emotions. He has the instinct of love. He is con- 
quered by justice. Any scheme for the computation of 
man which leaves out justice will in this world be a failure. 

But the toilers of the world are told that they should be 
content. They are assured that they do not grow poorer — 



JHE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 35 

that they receive more for their work than a century ago. 
The answer is no longer enough. The laborer has become 
intelligent. He is the child of the republic of free schools. 
He has read the Declaration. He has heard of the doc- 
trine of Equal Rights. He has taught it to his children 
until it has become his own faith. He has caught the echo 
of the words of Mirabeau, "There are only three ways of 
acquiring property,, by work,' by begging, and by stealth." 
Civilization has increased his needs. He cannot live as did 
his fathers, on the bare floors of a cabin. The glitter of his 
century would fill him with shame. Respectability would 
desert him. From his valley of poverty he points to those 
peaks of wealth and answers : " Those splendid heaps I 
helped to build; they are the product of my generation. I 
have worked for thirty years; my children are paupers, I 
have been robbed." 

The laborer is right. He has a cause. He is logical. 
He is consistent with the teachings of the republic. If he 
is to be content with work and poverty, he should not have 
heard of the Declaration. He should have been protected 
from the New Testament. The only way to make men sat- 
isfied with work and poverty is to keep them ignorant 
The slave-masters have understood this In every age. Free 
schools and industrial pauperism side by side are a mistake. 
The history of labor from the earliest times shows that cap- 
ital left to itself forces wages to a bare subsistence. A free 
government cannot afford to have its citizens dwarfs and 
paupers. 

The workingman understands all this. He is fond of 
telling the story of the man with the mule and a patch of 
ground. The man said to the mule: "I will harness you to 
the plough and plough this land, on which I will raise beans. 



36 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

I will eat the beans; you shall have the stalks." The mule 
said to the man, " That will not be fair ; I should have some 
beans." "You are unreasonable;" said the man, "your 
father was contented to eat thistles all his life." " That is 
true," said the mule; "but my father — he was an ass" 

If there were any fair distribution of the products of 
human labor there would go out from all the homes of this 
land men and women to purchase abundance of the neces- 
saries of life. There would be none of the "alternating 
fevers and chills" of our present industrial order. There 
would be no "gluts of the market " — no " industrial depres- 
sions." 

Three centuries before our era, the great Chinese sage, 
Mencins, taught that uncertainty as to the means of exist- 
ence is the most important factor in the demoralization of 
a people. At the end of two centuries of unrestricted com- 
petition, three-fourths of the people of the most prosperous 
commonwealth of the world are insecure of the means of 
subsistence. We have approached the limit of the great 
speculative opportunities for wealth. Doubt paralyzes the 
limbs of industry. Dread poisons the sweetness of the 
world. Fear sits like a specter at our brief banquet of life. 
Gloom shadows the way of the toiling millions. What kind 
of a civilization is that whose heart is Fear? 

Upon the results of this scheme of aggregated and aggre- 
gating wealth in the hands of individuals and corporations 
on the political morality of the nation, I need not speak. 
They are too familiar. 

One-eighth of the total wealth of the United States be- 
longs to the monopoly of transportation, the railroads. Its 
use in these hands for oppression and corruption is notori- 
ous. American statesmanship, like American sovereignty, 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 37 

has retired into the offices of the corporations. The United 
States Senate sits directly or indirectly, consciously or un- 
consciously, for "vested rights." 

We have heard of government by kings, by oligarchies, 
by aristocrats. We began a century ago as a government 
by the people. We have ended by giving the world a new 
study in political science — government by corporations. 
When the Pennsylvania railroad has no more business to 
transact in the legislature of that State, it is said that that 
political body adjourns. 

The late Mr. Tweed, of New York, had an acute appre- 
ciation of American politics. He manipulated a city and 
stole fifty millions of dollars. He recorded his vocation on 
the register of Sing-Sing as that of a statesman! He "got 
•even" with his friends outside. 

What is the conclusion? How will it end? The Duke 
of Weimar, looking upon the schemes of Napoleon in the 
height of his power, said, " This, will not last; it is unjust." 

I am not here to picture the details of an ideal common- 
wealth. There will come other days and there will be 
other gods. When civilized man is less a barbarian, the 
glitter of gold, the red waumpum of the savage, will not 
intoxicate his senses. He will cease to be drunken with 
the lust of vulgar advantage over his fellow-men. The 
triumphs of the brain will measure his ambition. The 
triumphs of justice will ease his heart. The victories of 
art, the splendor of noble affections, will fill his dreams. 
That which is said here does not concern Utopian fancies. 
While there is human weakness there will.be human suffer- 
ing. But organized wrong is curable. It should be assailed. 
There are ideas which, intrenched for centuries, stop the 
march of our race. They are superstitions. Human soci- 



38 THE MASSES AND THE MILLION AIRES. 

ety has the right to examine from time to time the founda- 
tions on which it rests. It lias the obligation to repair or 
renew these foundations when they have become rotten. 

The power of human governments is co-extensive with 
the welfare of peoples. It is limited by that welfare. To 
that limit it must approach. "Salus populi suprema lex est" 
is one of the oldest maxims of human government. The 
open secret of history is that justice and virtue lie deeper 
than institutions; that honesty is the preserver of nations. 
Beyond all laws, beyond all government, beyond all insti- 
tutions, beyond all vested rights, beyond all sneers, lie the 
indefeasible rights of man. 

Before nothing less than the intrenched citadel of these 
rights in the organization of human states, will the march 
of humanity pause. They are demanded by the conscience* 
of mankind. Their security is the goal of the race. 

What are these rights? That oldest of the economists 
the wisest of the Greeks, Aristotle, treating of the natural 
wealth of the world — "the source and raw material of all 
other wealth" — summed it up in a single descriptive phrase, 
"the bounty of nature." 

Supported by the great teachers of our kind, I affirm, as 
incontrovertible propositions commending themselves to the 
instinctive justice of man, that the world belongs to the 
living race; that the bounty of nature is the inheritance of 
all ; that the wealth made by the common forces of any civil- 
isation is the common wealth. I affirm that the human ' 
hand is as sacred as the human brain. I affirm that the 
robbery of Cunning is as malignant as the robbery of Force. 
I affirm that every problem of the dealings between men is 
a moral problem. I affirm that no economic scheme for 
tli is world which ignores abstract rights is a science. I af- 



THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 39 

firm that man's struggle should be with nature and not 
with his kind. I affirm that civilization without justice is 
a failure. 

If for the realization of the rights here intimated, it is 
necessary to enter the gateway of the future by the partial 
or the absolute industrial co-operation of men, it is History 
that has led us to this door. There is no longer choice as 
to changing the route. The ruggedness of the present path 
has turned to an impossible steep. Struggling humanity, 
hungry and ragged in "the presence of the riches it has cre- 
ated, has grown sick of its tyrants. The purpose of peo- 
ples is greater than the philosophy of the schools ; and the 
peoples are saying, not "There should be," but, "There shall 
be a change ! " 

h' the liberty of individual enterprise means only liberty 
for millionaires and hard luck for the masses, the world will 
turn once more to its primitive dream, the democracy of 
labor. That way, at least, lie justice and equality. That 
way lies escape from the lie of civilization — the preaching 
of its pulpits denied by the practice of its marts. That 
way lie the mighty hopes and the mighty instincts of our 
race. That way lies the solidarity of our kind. That way 
lies a dawn. 

When the vision of their wrong is a little nearer, when 
its remedy seems clear, the citizens of this commonwealth 
will not falter in the fight. Two wars for human freedom 
they have already fought. Two triumphs for ideals they 
have won. The soil of this continent is consecrated to the 
solution of the problem of absolute justice for man. 

The toiling millions of the earth look toward the Great 
Republic. Jt has given the world the spectacle of political 
government based upon the equality of manhood. There 



40 THE MASSES AND THE MILLIONAIRES. 

is awaited at its bands the spectacle of industry based on" 
the brother 1 ' od of Toil. Over the redoubts of the Past, 
over the bastions of Wrong, over the dreams of the Old, 
bearing aloft the flag of the Declaration and the doctrines 
of the Nazare-ie, Americans will be the first to scale the 
heights and enter the citadel of the New Time. 



